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Extract transcripts from a whole YouTube channel

Researching a creator, training a chatbot on their content, or auditing competitors — here's how to grab a channel's entire spoken content.

In the browser (no code)

1. Open Bulk extract and pick the Channel tab.
2. Paste the channel's @handle (e.g. @mkbhd), its URL, or a UC… channel ID — VidWords resolves the channel ID for you.
3. Hit Find videos. The latest videos (up to 500) are listed for free — finding videos never costs credits.
4. Click Extract all. Progress runs three videos at a time; failures (e.g. caption-less videos) are listed per video and never charged.
5. Download everything as one combined .txt, .json, or .csv.

Over the API

The channels endpoint (Plus and Pro plans) turns handles into video lists, which you then feed to the transcripts endpoint in batches of 50:

curl -X POST https://vidwords.com/api/channels \
  -H "Authorization: Basic YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"ids": ["@mkbhd"]}'

The response includes channelId, the channel title, and each video's id — pipe those ids into POST /api/transcripts.

Practical notes

• Listings return the newest 500 videos per request.
• One transcript = one credit; resolving the channel list is free.
• Some videos legitimately have no transcript (captions disabled, music-only, age-restricted) — these come back as per-video errors, not failures of the whole batch.

Try channel extraction →